InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues sees 2010 as a watershed year for Ubuntu, one that could herald meaningful enterprise interest in the OS, thanks to a rising tide of developers - and deployment servers - adopting the OS. "As with many recent trends in the IT industry, developers become ambassadors for products they enjoy using and have quickly become an early indicator for enterprise technology usage in the future. In a seemingly perfect storm, Ubuntu is benefiting from strong developer usage, and the fact that developers are increasingly selecting Amazon's EC2 cloud platform bodes well for continued Ubuntu success on EC2," Rodrigues writes, noting that Ubuntu has surpassed Red Hat usage on deployment servers as well. "As that occurs, IT decision makers will need to consider or reconsider Ubuntu for usage within the enterprise. Rest assured that Red Hat won't sit idly by during these discussions."

As for the stats that someone posted to earlier, those stats are based on desktop usage. This was an article about servers. If you really want some interesting stats, check out the number of web servers running on each OS type. Windows isn't the only game in town.

As for competition with Red Hat, I will say what I have said before. There is NO development coming out of Canonical. Compared to what Red Hat produces its not even on the map. Also remember that Canonical is only interested in monetizing Ubuntu. (Mark's words not mine) And while Ubuntu might be the shiny new toy everyone wants to begin with, when the toy breaks it isn't Canonical that's going to be able to fix it. Its Red Hat. You better hope nothing bad happens to Red Hat, or the damage to the platform could be immense.